Author: fdcservers

Virtual Private Servers(VPS) has gained immense popularity over a couple of years owing to the performance and functionality advancements in the virtualization technologies. In order to experience the benefit of utilizing own dedicated servers, numerous customers are upgrading their existing Linux shared hosting packages to Linux servers. With the presence of Linux Security Model (LSM), Linux VPS are significantly more secure when compared with other operating systems, yet they are not perfect and are vulnerable to attacks. Being acquainted of the risks and outcomes will help you to maintain a balance between usability and security. It is necessary to adopt a methodology that will shield your server from the prominent attacks along with the efficient administration.

The fundamental action you need to do when you set on a new VPS is to set up a protected environment custom fitted to your needs. In this article, let’s have a look at some of the most common security measures to be taken in a Linux server environment. This isn’t a comprehensive rundown and does not cover configuration details, but rather it will cover the fundamental strides for securing a Linux-based VPS.

Configure a Firewall

Firewalls take a note of the traffic headed in and out of your server. If you want a truly secure VPS, you need to enable and configure VPS. Initially, your server should be set to utilize only the networking ports that are absolutely necessary for all the standard and legitimate services. Then set up your firewall, which poses as a barrier between the general internet traffic and your machine. Firewalls deny in and outgoing traffic, at the same time protects the rest of the ports from security breaches. Some of the popular Linux firewalls are IPTables, UFW Firewall, NFTables, IP6Tables etc

Utilize SSH For Secure Login

When managing a server where you do not have local access, you should sign in remotely. The most secure approach to sign into a remote server is by utilizing the SSH which offers end-to-end encryption to burrow insecure traffic over a secure connection.

It is obvious that one cannot hack SSH when they can’t discover it. In order, to prevent the malignant scripts from directly connecting to default port (22), you need to change the SSH port number. Implementing a solution like fail2ban helps with the general security of your SSH configuration. They monitor log files to determine if the remote system is a legitimate user, if not they temporarily ban future traffic from the associated IP address.

Set GnuPG Encryption

To add even more security, you can facilitate login using a matching private key which is so complex and brute-forcing is not practical. For this, you need to add a public SSH key on a server that can only be decrypted by a “private key” which is available only to the intended recipient.

Enable Sudo Access

Every Linux VPS possess the username as “root” in default. This encourages hackers to crack the password by attempting brute force attacks. In order to defend from such security threats, you need to deactivate the root login option and create another username. To execute root level commands, you should use “sudo” command and It is always advisable to create unique user accounts for each user and service on your Linux VPS. Each user should be set with the required permissions and privileges in order to complete their task and the rest of the permissions and privileges should be kept inaccessible. Ensure that you disable all unnecessary user accounts who no longer need access to your system.

Replace FTP With SFTP

FTP is a protocol that is inherently insecure and is vulnerable to packet sniffing. SFTP is “FTP over SSH” otherwise known as “secure FTP”. SFTP encrypts all the data which includes the files that are being transferred and credentials.

Stay Updated

Security Patching is an important task in securing your Linux VPS. Outdated systems may have security holes and are vulnerable to intrusion attacks. Hence, Security updates are released on a regular basis to prevent hackers from intruding into your servers. Hence, ensure that you make use of the available package management tools to keep your system up-to-date.

Partition Your Disk

In order to keep operating system files away from third-party programs, user files, and tmp files you need to partition your disk. For added security, you can also disable “nosuid” and “noexec” on the operating system partition.

Install Intrusion Detection Systems

You can effectively detect suspicious activities such as DoS attacks and port scans by installing intrusion detection systems which are available in the market in bulk. Some of the popular intrusion detection systems are RKHunter, Bro, Psad, Aide etc. They monitor and analyze the internals of a computing application.

Hopefully, this article has managed to acquaint you with the general security practices to ensure your Linux VPS is shielded from malicious attacks. Since you are in charge of your server’s security, guarantee you stay cautious against some the most widely recognized security threats. Even though securing Linux VPS servers is a tedious task which invests a lot of time and effort, it is an essential part of server administration. To stay ahead of hackers keep auditing and evaluating your system and the solutions continuously.

With the ongoing technological evolution, choosing the best architecture for your business is extremely important as it will improve the growth and development of your company through simplified management, reducing cost, improving efficiency and protecting your data. Whether it is a small, medium or large enterprise, the right business infrastructure can only be gained by an excellent teamwork and management. The business infrastructure joins hand with resources, services, and technology to achieve strategic goals through planned processes and systems. Based on the mode of the business process one can choose Traditional or Converged or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.

Since infrastructure is an integral part to enhance your business leads, this article emphases a clear idea about the differences between the above said infrastructure solutions, which ultimately helps you to choose the right infrastructure for your business.

Traditional Infrastructure

A traditional infrastructure is the combination of individual units namely networking, backup tools, storage and application servers. These individual units are interlinked to each other and, they are configured and managed individually. There are chances that each individual unit is brought forth from different vendors, which in turn raises the necessity of IT experts specialized in a different field to manage and to offer support to each unit.

Converged Infrastructure

Unlike traditional infrastructure, converged infrastructure is a pre-configured product stack where storage, networking, and application servers are sold as a single ready-to-use solution. However, converged infrastructure offers a limited flexibility to adapt to workload and each appliance in the converged stack should be managed separately in some cases.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Hyper-converged infrastructure is becoming increasingly popular as different units which include networking, storage, backup are combined into a single unit. These single units are purchased from a single vendor and the management of these units is centralized. Comparing the traditional and converged infrastructure, configuration of the whole solution takes less time in the hyper-converged infrastructure as it integrates all the technology. This infrastructure enables easy deployment and management of virtual machines and software layer gain flexibility while utilizing hardware resources.

Which One To Choose For Your Business?

The traditional infrastructure manages each unit individually and it requires a full-fledged large team of experts to handle each unit with utmost care. Even though in converged infrastructure, each element should be managed individually and requires a lot of control, it is a good choice for large enterprises as it eliminates the need of purchasing each component separately. In contrast to the traditional and converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure offers simplified management, financially savvy solution with an increased efficiency and agility. They can be deployed faster with high data protection.

Right before making a choice of infrastructure for your business, it is necessary to take an account of your business size and business needs. Traditional infrastructure will work for businesses that possess huge data centers and multi-national companies that handle huge deployments. It requires multiple tools and team to ensure high performance. They are a bit expensive in terms of hardware investments. In a case, where your business requires traditional infrastructure, yet you can choose a converged infrastructure if you are required to handle the deployment from scratch. Converged infrastructure reduces the cost of huge hardware investments from different vendors.

Hyper-converged infrastructure stack up against traditional and converged infrastructure when considering the key functions. This suits business which requires fast deployment and quick access to resources. A centralized too provides end-to-end storage and networking ability. The inbuilt tools possess the capability of replacing data or hardware when needed. Overall hyper-converged infrastructure is easy to implement, manage and maintain in a financially savvy budget.

If your business requires simplified delivery of private cloud/IT resources, then hyper-converged infrastructure serves this purpose with its API-driven approach. Converged or traditional infrastructure suits when your business requires a hardware-focused approach with flexible deployment and customization.

To conclude, there is certifiably not a one-measure fits-all approach with regards to picking an appropriate technology for your business as it should be lined up with your business strategy and goals. Ensure that you picking an infrastructure that empowers your business results to be sustained and convey more prominent consumer loyalty.

In the present online era, websites set the backbone of every business. Whether it is a small or large business, for a business to flourish website has become vital. Customers purchase things just with the tick of a mouse in these days and they expect that the information they are looking for should appear within a fraction of time. Under such circumstances, imagine if your web pages experience a delay in loading, it is obvious that the visitors leave your web page and navigate to your competitor’s web page. A couple of additional seconds leaves a huge impact on your business sales and this triggers the need of having a speedy website not only to rank well with Google but rather to benefit a greater ROI.

In this article, we will outline the necessity of a quick responsive website and the ways to speed up your website to improve the conversion rate.

Impacts Of Slow Loading Websites

Nothing is more baffling than a slow website. It not only hinders the user’s experience but also leaves a huge impact on ranking in Google. As mentioned earlier, a majority of the users expect the page to load in few seconds and if it fails, they abandon the pages and head to another site. This results in fewer page views leading to traffic loss.

Slow loading websites mark a negative brand image in the minds of the visitors and this deters them from visiting the website again. Ultimately all these impacts lead to loss of conversions and revenue.

Slow loading websites rule out the impact in visibility too. Google always prioritize sites that have good loading speed as they don’t want to lead their users to a site that won’t load or respond quickly. In order to gain visibility and ranking, it is important to reduce the loading time of your website.

Few Tools To Check Your Website Speed

There are a variety of speed test tools available online to test your website’s speed. Each tool comes with unique features, reporting systems, and distinctive approaches to analyze your outcomes and let’s have a look on few of them.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights

GTmetrix

Pingdom

WebPageTest

YSlow

UpTrends

PerfTool

PageScoring

You have to just enter your website’s URL on these tools and they will analyze your site loading speed, identify the bottlenecks and suggest actionable recommendations to make your website faster.

Ways To Speed Up Your Website

Mentioned below are the few ways to speed up your website

Do Not Choose Cheap Hosting Plans

Most of the people go behind cheap hosting plans, which offers shared hosting. Shared hosting ultimately slows down your website and it is very essential to upgrade your hosting plan. You can either choose VPS or dedicated hosting, considering your business needs. Both these hosting options significantly increase the website speed.

Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN delivers content more efficiently to users as it is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations around the world. CDN’s can save up to 60% bandwidth, reduce the load on any single server and also protect your website against DDoS attacks.

Cut Down HTTP Requests

Too many HTTP requests considerably make your website slow. For each on-page component of your website, an HTTP request is made. Hence, if there are a large number of on-page components in your website, page rendering will be longer. You can minimize the HTTP requests by

Large image size has a huge impact on the website speed, so it is necessary to optimize the images by compressing the image, cropping the image or by changing the resolution of the image.

Enable Caching

Enabling caching for your website improves user experience as it stores a version of your website on users browser and serves the same version until your website is updated. In WordPress, you can do this by adding any of the following plugins W3 Total Cache, W3 Super Cache.

CSS and JS Optimization

Each time your user visits a site, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files adds to the number of requests your website makes and this affects the website speed. You can reduce this number by minifying and combining your files, using asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files and by deferring Javascript loading.

Avoid Using Too Many Plugins

Even though you install a plugin to build custom functionality, to eliminate a coding mess and improve user experience, it has few downsides as well. Installing too many plugins to your site makes your website slow, crash and also create security issues. So you have to run a speed test by enabling all your plugins and detect which plugin makes your website slow and take necessary action.

DNS Lookup

How rapidly your page loads depends on the measure of time your DNS lookup takes. In case you’re utilizing a slow DNS, the time for browsers to locate your site increases. To speed up the process it is necessary to switching to a faster DNS provider.

Few Other Recommendations

A junky theme with puffed up code affects your website’s performance. Changing the website theme can improve speed
Enabling Gzip compression automatically compresses your website files into zip files and as a result website speed increases
Enabling HTTP keep-alive limits the number of connection to your server which ultimately leads to a faster website
It is necessary to fix all the broken links on your website

Having analyzed your website and if your website shows poor loading time, it’s high time to take actions to speed up your website. In this post, we have suggested a few tips to decrease load time and improve the site’s performance. Remember, you cannot adopt all these strategies overnight, yet you have to ensure that you adopt these strategies at a slow pace to reap success in your business goals.

Owing to the rapid rise of hacking attempts and fraudulent activities on each passing day, all the businesses and website owners are concerned in protecting their websites against cyber threats and vulnerabilities. Inorder, to make the web a safer place by ensuring security, privacy and data integrity, search engines like Google, encourages website owners to use HTTPS protocols in the URL, which implies that the URLs are secured by an SSL certificate. In this article let’s take a look on, What is SSL? Why SSL is important for a website? Different forms of SSL and how they differ? Which one to choose among them?

What Is An SSL Certificate?

In simple words, SSL acts as a powerful weapon for web security which assures a protection for website owners to protect themselves and their users. For instance, when you are carrying out a bank transaction, the information you send online, pass through different systems to reach the destination server. Hence, the confidential information such as user name, password etc will be visible to the systems that are in between yours and the server. To prevent such action, SSL certificate is used. It encrypts the confidential information that are sent online and make the information available in a readable format only to the intended recipient to whom you are sending information. Google indicates the websites that have adopted SSL certificate by displaying “https” letters in the URL in green color. This visually reassures the visitors that their connection to the particular website is trusted and their confidential information will be kept secured.

Are SSL Certificates Mandatory For A Website?

With no doubt, the answer to this question should be “yes”. It is an irresistible out and out necessity in the present scenario to safeguard your website from the emerging creativity of cybercriminals. You can reap the following benefits by adopting a SSL certificate to your website.

Assured data protection as every bit of information is encrypted

Promises your identity with proper authentication

Increased authority of the website and boosts search engine ranking

Improved customer trust

Websites comply to PCI/DSS standards

Now, have you decided to adopt an SSL certificate for your website? You can contact your web hosting providers to check if they offer SSL certificates. And now, you have to choose between the two forms of SSL certificate for your website. Read further to know about the different forms of SSL certificates.

Forms Of SSL Certificates

SSL certificates are of two forms Free SSL Certificates and Paid SSL Certificates.

As the name implies, Free SSL certificates are available free of costs and they do not come with any support or warranty. Free SSL certificates are of two types. First one is, self-signed certificates which are not signed by any certificate authority. The other one is signed by a certificate authority.

Paid SSL certificates is available on payment and signed by a trustworthy certificate authority (CA). They can be purchased directly from the Certificate Authority’s website or from any retailers.

Free SSL Vs Paid SSL

Even though free SSL and paid SSL possess diverse features, the level of encryption provided by both the certificates are equal. Let’s take a look on the differences between free SSL and paid SSL.

Validation Options

Free SSL offers Domain Validation (DV) option in which only one domain can be secured. This provides only a basic level of authentication by authenticating only the domain’s ownership and no effort is made to verify who the domain owner is.

Paid SSL mandatorily verifies the identity of the website owner before issuing the certificate. It additionally includes Extended Validation (EV) and Organization Validation (OV) certificates, which are issued by the certificate authority after a thorough verification of the business.

Validation Period

Validation of Free SSL certificate is limited to a shorter period of 30-90 days, paving a way for frequent renewal. Whereas Paid SSL certificate is offered for a period of 1 or 2 years which enables your online business to stay secured for a long time and website proprietor need not worry about the frequent renewals.

Customer Certainty

Free SSL lacks customer trust as it is not issued by a reputable certificate authority. Search engines indicate the websites that have adopted OV and EV certificates by displaying “https” letters in the URL in green color. This visually reassures the visitors that their connection to the particular website is trusted and their confidential information will be kept secured.

Guaranteed Customer Support

Paid SSLs issued by Certified Authorities (CA) and retailers guarantee round the clock prompt customer support via email or call or chat. Free SSLs cannot afford to offer such a prompt support and the website owners have to surf the web to find an optimal solution for an issue.

Warranty Claims

If anything goes wrong in your website such as data breach or hacks, when equipped with Free SSL, there is no option to avail damage coverage. This is not in the case of Paid SSLs where you get an insurance coverage for the incurred loss. The coverage amount depends on the price of your SSL. High Paid SSLs are likely to get an ample warranty.

How To Choose The Right SSL For Your Business?

Having known the features of both the SSLs, it is important to choose the right form of SSL considering your website and business requirements. If you own a small websites or blogs you can opt for Free SSLs as they come with lot of constraints. If you own a business website or e-commerce website which involves confidential information like account number, account passwords, undoubtedly you have to opt Paid SSLs to gain the customer trust and accelerate the conversion rates. Though with Paid SSLs you have to spend a bit upfront, you will surely reap the benefits on time.

As the demand for online content increases, the demand for a critical technology which can deliver video, huge files, and other web content to users quickly and reliably increases. The delay that occurs between the loading of a web page and when the page actually appears is termed to be latency. The latency of a page may be high due to the geographical distance between your computer and the hosting server of the web page and no user can’t wait so long for a content to load and they simply close or navigate to another web application.

CDN’s are evolved to solve such a fundamental problem by accelerating the delivery of content. The cached content on multiple servers are widely distributed across the geographical locations to deliver a range of content to numerous endpoints swiftly in a cost-effective manner.

In this article, let’s have a look on how CDN’s work and the types of CDN deliveries based on the user requirements.

How CDN’s Work?

Generally, CDN’s are a large network of servers. They reduce the physical stretch between a web server and a user by having the copies of content pulled from the origin server to spread across geographies in storage banks called caches or PoPs. So when a user from the US tries to access French content it can simply be fetched from a local US PoP, instead of routing the content from France. In the nutshell, CDN’s are great in offering a superlative coverage to the users, thereby improving the user experience.

Types Of CDN’s

Based on the purposes, CDN deliveries fall into three categories: General Purpose CDN’s, On-demand Video CDN’s, Live Video CDN’s. Let’s explore in detail each of the categories in detail.

General Purpose CDN

General purpose CDN’s took its form before the emergence of video and you might have come across a general purpose CDN while surfing a popular website or when downloading a software update or when streaming a song on YouTube. They drive the web traffic by retrieving cached content from diverse regions. However, web acceleration has become bit complex and highly fragmented as they rely on a large number of servers worldwide falling along the language lines and country boundaries. The language clusters in a single country can prompt numerous CDNs having the capacity to make advances into different parts of the market.

On-Demand Video CDN

Barely, to curb the number of bits being delivered to the user, CDNs would not really like to spend the additional cost of hardware and streaming software. Hence the formats direct download, progressive download, and HTTP streaming are evolved.

Direct download requires a video to be downloaded before viewing. However, this turns out to be a time-consuming burdensome process for large applications and movies, while shorter clips can be downloaded quickly.

YouTube is a perfect example of progressive download which demands a bit-by-bit download. Here, the viewer can watch a part of the video while the rest being downloaded facilitating concurrent download and utilization of the video. Progressive downloads turn out to be more effective and practical as the speed of the download that is required to deliver the standard-definition content exceeds the bit rate as the internet speed increases.

HTTP streaming technology chokes the on-demand content by dividing it into tiny bits and stream each bit separately. In order to customize a particular stream to a user’s video player, streaming is performed at varying bit rates.

Live Video CDN

Besides other forms of CDN delivery, live video delivery is crucial as the majority of video content delivered by CDNs is on-demand video and live video can’t be cached. Hence the basic CDN infrastructure took a new form as a live streaming CDNs.

Live streaming CDN’s are becoming popular despite being costly during peak user views and the cost cannot be adequately recovered as we cannot expect continuous usage. However, live streaming CDN is expected to rule the sphere by marking itself as mainstream communication.

Final Verdict

A CDN can fill in as an enchantment fix in smoothening content transmission to your clients. They offer specific benefits to different types of business sectors such as IT corporates, media, government, finance, e-commerce etc. Get ready to experience a remarkable business experience by integrating CDN to your streaming platform.

We very well know that every business relies on some form of data to function successfully. Most of the organizations strive hard to effectively handle the rapid growth of data and they have to truly reconsider of having effective and efficient systems set up to manage their storage. To cater such needs, NVMe (Non-volatile Memory Express) popped up. It is a high-speed storage protocol and a host controller interface that can accelerate the data transfer between enterprise, client systems, and SSD. In this article, let’s explore what is NVMe and why NVMe should be considered for your business.

What Is NVME And How It Works?

NVME is a cutting-edge technology that is successfully replacing SATA and SAS protocols. It focuses on processing high volume data for real-time analytics. It acts as a highly scalable storage, Non-Uniform Memory Access(NUMA) protocol connecting the host to the memory subsystem. The protocol is directly connected to CPU via PCle interface and is built on high-speed PCIe lanes. NVMe is capable of supporting 64k commands per queue up to 64k queues. Queues can effectively power up the parallel processing capabilities of multi-core processors. Some of the benefits of NVMe storage stack includes low latency, fewer clock cycles per I/O and small overhead.

NVMe allows sharing the ownership of queues, priority, atomicity of commands, arbitration mechanisms for multiple CPU cores as it is a NUMA optimized protocol. The SSDs of NVMe is capable of gathering commands and process them unfavorably to achieve a low data latency and high IOPS.

NVME For Business

As we said in the beginning, with the exponential generation of the vast amount of data and with the emergence of latest technologies like IoT, AI, Blockchain which requires an enormous data to be analyzed, stored and processed, accelerates enterprises to opt for a high-performance storage media. NVMe protocol is a non-volatile storage media which is uniquely built to deliver a high-performance computing environment. It can effectively eliminate the bottlenecks and scale up to meet the rising data demands.

As NVMe consumes very few CPU cycles when compared to SAS or SATA, NVMe enabled infrastructure will likely yield maximum returns. NVMe based systems are widely used in IoT processing and machine learning which requires high performing, low latency network to process, analyze and return the consumed data at higher computing rate.

NVMe can be widely used in data centers as it possesses capabilities to the demanding and time-sensitive requirements of a high-performance computing environment, cloud, portal data centers etc

Organizations deploying Big Data and OLTP relational database platforms need to handle extensive workloads and NVMe enables to make fast, real-time data based decisions. NVMe can also be employed for data backup or replication within compliance windows.

NVMe is primarily designed for enterprise and client applications handling critical data. For proper utilization of NVMe, organizations should go for NVMe deployment considering the business and technical requirements. NVMe lets organizations to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs and allows to perform more with the data.

With the rise of modern workloads namely cloud infrastructure, media repositories, data analytics, backup and restore systems require a massive storage solution to manage critical business data. To cater such needs, Ceph storage comes with a scalable, open, software-defined storage platform. Ceph has the ability to transform your organization’s IT infrastructure by freeing you from the expensive lock-in of proprietary to manage the vast amount of data. Let’s explore in detail what is Ceph storage.

What Is Ceph?

Ceph is an open-source, unified, distributed software storage solution that provides a scalable and reliable clustered storage solution under one whole system. To run on a commodity hardware, storage clusters of Ceph are designed based on an algorithm known as CRUSH (Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing). This algorithm enables the even distribution of a large amount of data across the right clusters and sub-clusters. Such division of data simplifies the large data storage mechanism and also enables hassle-free data retrieval.

Ceph’s functioning as a storage system is made quite simple by making use of an object-based storage, block-based storage, and file system.

Block-Based Storage

It is possible to mount Ceph as a block device and can be attached to virtual machines or bare-metal Linux-based servers. The block component is known to be Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which can provide block storage capabilities such as snapshots and replication. RADOS is integrated with OpenStack Block Storage to work as a back end.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of block-based storage

Potential to scale with Linux or other virtual machines

Thinly provisioned

Read-only and revert to snapshots

Resizable images

Object-Based Storage

Client applications possess the ability to directly access the RADOS object-based storage system through Ceph’s software libraries. Ceph object-based storage is an interface raised on the apex of librados to proffer applications with a tranquil gateway to Ceph storage clusters.

Let’s explore the interfaces supported by Ceph object storage

Swift Compatible

The object storage functionality is compatible with a large subset of the OpenStack Swift API.

S3-Compatible

The object storage functionality that is compatible with a large subset of the Amazon S3 REST API.

File System

Ceph’s file system provides object storage and block device interfaces by running on the top of same object storage system. The file storage of Ceph makes use of a compliant Ceph file system known as Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) to store data in a Ceph storage cluster.

The metadata server cluster of Ceph carry out the function of mapping the directories and file names of the file system to objects stored within RADOS clusters. As metadata server cluster can expand or contract, they guarantee high performance by hindering heavy work loads on cluster hosts.

Let’s have a look on the benefits of Ceph’s file system

Automatic balancing of a file system to ensure maximum performance

Virtually unlimited storage

Guaranteed data security for critical applications

No customization is required to use file system CEPH FS with POSIX

How Is Ceph Storage Beneficial For Emerging IT Infrastructures?

To cope with the exponential data growth, organizations are on a massive search mission to find a solution that can effectively store large volumes of data at a reasonable cost. Read the rest of the article to know how Ceph storage is beneficial for emerging IT infrastructures deploying a cloud technology.

Easy to Manage

Ceph facilitates to invariably scale without affecting the organization’s capital and operational expenditures. Starting from cluster rebalancing to error recovery, Ceph dumps work from clients by making use of distributed computing power of Ceph’s OSD. A Ceph node is incorporated with a commodity hardware, intelligent daemons, and Ceph storage clusters. They effectively replicate and dynamically re-distribute data through an effective communication. Ceph monitors continuously monitor these nodes to ensure high availability.

Scalable Storage Solution

Data distribution and replication is made possible by adopting a scalable storage solution. During data distribution, a hash function maps the objects into placement groups. They then use CRUSH to assist OSD’s in storing object replicas. Data is replicated in a phase of these placement groups each of which is mapped to an ordered list of OSDs.

Ensures Data Safety and Recovery

Ceph storage ensures data safety by safely replicating the data updates on a disk to tackle any sort of failures. Ceph monitoring promptly detects and resolves the abnormalities experienced in the distributed environment. In addition to the safe data storage, Ceph also recovers clusters of data quickly.

To conclude, on the whole Ceph offers a holistic storage system by effectively addressing the scalability, reliability and performance issues and that’s why it is being widely chosen among the web hosting providers and businesses.

With the constant advancements in technology choosing a right option for building powerful and dynamic web applications is surely a tedious task. As we know, Linux, Apache web server, MYSQL database, Perl, Python or PHP posses a powerful platform comprising their own features. Won’t it be great, if there exists a platform which makes use of the above-said items together? LAMP technology is one such technology which has gained popularity over the recent years. With its power packed potential resources, it’s surely the most popular choice of web development among the web developers.

What is LAMP?

Linux based web servers comprises of an arrangement of four software components that form a software stack. These components are arranged in layers to build a powerful web application platform. This grouping empowers the websites and web applications to run on the top of this hidden stack. LAMP software is an open-source platform which uses Linux as its operating system, Apache as a web server, PHP as the object-oriented scripting language and MySQL as the relational database management system. Most of the Linux distributions fabricate the LAMP stack components in default.

Linux

Linux sets the foundation of the stack model and doesn’t require any specific distribution to put up a LAMP stack on a server. The commonly used distributions include Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian as they offer a wide range of online guide to support users.

Apache

The next layer is occupied by the most popular open-source web server on the internet. It has a modular design which includes a support to bind up with the web programming languages and modules for a wide range of extensions.

MySQL

You should note that MariaDB is replacing MySQL in many LAMP deployments as there are cases where you will be using software that explicitly requires MySQL.

PHP

PHP sits on the top of the stack and it effectively simplifies the creation of dynamic web pages.

Working Of LAMP Stack

Apache web server is responsible for handling the web page requests coming in from the browsers. If it is a PHP file request, web server passes the request to PHP which loads the file and executes the code within the file. PHP communicates with the MySQL to fetch or store if the code makes any reference to the data stored in the database. PHP can effectively create HTML required by the web browser to render the web page using the code in the file and data from the database. As soon as PHP completes running the code in the file, it passes the resultant data to the Apache web server to send back to the browser. These operations are included by default in the Linux operating system beneath the server.

How LAMP Stack Benefits Your Business?

The most effective way to develop a simple to complex enterprise level web application is by using a LAMP as it holds customization, flexibility, and cost-effective, powerful security features.

All the components in LAMP stack are open source software that is readily available in free

You can develop and deploy LAMP-based projects without paying any license fees for distributing the software

The use of PHP and MySQL facilitates quick error fixing and perform modifications as users have complete access to the source

Development and Deployment Simplicity

Powerful web applications can be built using LAMP technology with a simple code and it is easy to modify or extend the application as per your business requirements. Most of the hosting services provide standard LAMP based environments and can be deployed easily with no license fees and through Linux distribution such as Debian, Fedora etc

Flexibility

Unlike other technology suppliers, the LAMP stack does not limit your development options. It offers a complete flexibility to build and deploy applications considering your unique business needs.

Customization

As LAMP components are the open source they provide great customization features with a wide range of additional modules and functionality

Security

LAMP technology is secure and stable. It possesses a powerful security feature to mitigate vulnerable attacks and if any error occurs it can be fixed quickly in a financially savvy approach.

Support Community

A large number of experienced and good-minded people in the community are ready to offer a prompt support during the phase of development, deployment and so on.

Economically Savvy

Compared to other software packages, LAMP stack is economically savvy as it can be acquired at a comparatively low price.

In short, LAMP shines as an appropriate substitute to commercial packages and it operates as layered software programs that bestow an indispensable platform to develop and implement web-based applications and servers. A wide array of LAMP stack alternatives are available which includes LNMP or LEMP (Nginx web server instead of Apache), WAMP (Windows as OS instead of Linux), WIMP(Windows and Microsoft’s Internet Information Services web server) etc. All of these possess similar principles to use as an entirely open source solution, and the support for effortlessly installable versions with Linux distributions is an undeniable reward.

For an operating system to function efficiently, it should be synchronized with the various units in the system. There are chances of experiencing a system crash, eventually with a data loss when any of the units fail to connect. “Kernel Panic” is one such system crash.

On the off chance, if an operating system encountered a fatal error internally and unable to recover from it, then the operating system implements a safety measure known as “kernel panic” to stop the system from running and eliminating huge data loss. Majority of the users have come across this situation when a normal working system restarts all of a sudden and the work done since you last saved will be lost.

Causes For Kernel Panic

Kernel Panic can be caused by a number of reasons. Few suspected reasons have been mentioned below

An inappropriate attempt by OS to read or write memory

Improper installation of RAM chips

Defective microprocessor chip

Malware or software bugs

Data corruption

Hard-disk damage

How To Detect If It’s A Kernel Panic?

The term “Kernel Panic” is primarily applied to MAC OS X and UNIX based systems. In Windows, it is known as “general protection fault’, “blue screen of death” etc. Let’s explore how to detect a Kernel Panic in each of the operating systems.

Mac

On OS X 10.7 version and it’s earlier versions, the screen produces an alarm and fades to black containing a message to restart. In OS X 10.8 version and it’s later versions, the system simply restarts without any warning, followed by a message explaining the issue briefly.

Linux

On Linux systems, the operating system can deal with the serious error and continues to run known as Kernel Oops. Eventually, instability occurs and lead to Kernel panic displaying a black screen full of code.

Windows

On Windows you will find the whole screen turned blue, displaying a message to restart the computer.

Kernel Panic Troubleshooting

A log will be created containing the information of what occurred at each occurrence of a kernel panic. Even though the information is incomprehensive to the normal users, the technicians can effectively diagnose and resolve the issues considering then the information in the log.

Let’s explore how to troubleshoot a few common causes

Software Issues

In order to diagnose the software issues, you need to boot into Safe mode to load the core elements of an operating system. Linux doesn’t have a safe mode but a recovery partition. In Windows, you could boot into safe mode by holding F8 when restarting, whereas, in Mac, you need to hold the shift key after the occurrence of a startup chime.

Let’s have a look on how to troubleshoot the software issues

Keep Your System and Software Updated

Always keep an eye on the updates announced frequently. Make sure that your operating system including the drivers has updated to the latest version and also the software. Check for the programs that are launching on boot and disable the ones which you have installed shortly before the occurrence of kernel panic and then re-enable.

Make Use Of System Restore

The unsaved changes made to the system will be lost on the occurrence of Kernel panic. Hence it is vital to use Time Machine or System Restore to roll back to the state before Kernel panic occurred.

Hardware Issues

A key to effectively identify the exact cause of kernel panic is to identify the recent changes to your system, undoing the changes and then try re-enabling one by one.

Look For Disk Errors

To ensure disk errors are not causing a Kernel panic, you need to run the disk repair software built into your computer’s OS. As soon as your computer boots, if it crashes you have to boot into the recovery partition. To do this press Command + R on Mac and F10 on Windows. You can carry out booting from a disk or USB.

Inspect RAM

If you have upgraded the RAM on your system recently, check if is placed properly. Try removing the RAM if the problem still continues and if the issues are resolved, you should understand that the RAM is faulty and you have to contact the retailer.

Inspect Peripherals

Often we believe that large add-ons alone cause issues. But Kernel panic can happen even if there is a fault in your USB. You can re-connect the peripherals confirming if there is no fault.

Kernel panics are common and you will be experiencing it time to time. If you experience them on a regular basis, then it is obvious that the recent changes done to the system has caused it. However it’s not a wider problem and as long as you’re prepared to deal with it, it is easy to diagnose and resolve.

For any business, be it a small, medium or large business, data is considered to be a valuable asset. Entrepreneurs are very keen in choosing a right system and infrastructure to manage their online applications but they fail to implement a system for data protection. A data loss equals a business loss. Hence, entrepreneurs should ensure data protection by adding RAID to the storage configuration.

Why Is RAID So Important?

Every business need to store an enormous amount of client data, confidential information and many more. If you are storing them in a multiple drive without utilizing RAID, there are chances of data loss due to a disk failure. You may defend telling, you have a regular backup. Still, there are chances of backup failure due to a sudden unpredicted failure the in hard drive. Implementing RAID is an indispensable option to ensure data protection and data accessibility without interruption.. RAID additionally serves as a performance booster too.

Things To Consider When Choosing A RAID Level

There a wide range of RAID levels with different functionalities. It is important to choose a right RAID level considering your business requirements. Choosing a wrong RAID level might land you in trouble. Let’s explore the criterias to be considered when choosing a RAID level.

Capacity

Each RAID level incorporates different net usable space after accounting for RAID overhead. If capacity is your primary concern, you should be keen in choosing a right RAID level.

Performance Requirements

Each application on your system is unique and set for a different purpose. Hence, it is important to choose a RAID level that matches your workload.

Reliability

Choose a suitable level that matches your system availability requirements, if your business is keen in ensuring less downtime.

Cost

A highly redundant array will be expensive whereas an average speed redundant array cost less. It is necessary to opt for an array that balances cost and performance.

RAID Levels

You cannot opt for one-size-fits all approach when choosing RAID as one factor usually comes to the detriment of another. Some RAID levels can be utilized for performance but not for redundancy. Similarly, you can utilize some RAID levels for redundancy but not capacity and the functionalists differ in terms of cost too.

Let’s take a look on different RAID levels and how they cater your business requirements.

RAID 0

RAID 0 configuration offers maximum performance at low cost. As there is no RAID overhead all drives can be combined to a single logic disk. They also provide excellent capacity with 100% utilization. The main disadvantage of RAID 0 is that there is no data protection. A failure in a single drive results in a total data loss.

RAID 1

RAID 1 is commonly referred as disk mirror as it duplicates data in two seperate drives. Data is drive 1 is mirrored to drive 2. Since drive 2 maintains the clone of drive 1, capacity is utilized to 50% of the drives available. In short, RAID 1 ensures data protection, but no performance and capacity. RAID 1 is suitable if there are no capacity or performance requirements, but when the user requires 100% security for the data and this makes RAID 1 little expensive than RAID 0.

RAID 5

RAID 5 uses 3 or more drives in an array and also distributes parity data across all drives to improve reliability. RAID 5 outstands in the capacity as the parity drive always require one drive capacity less than the total number of drive in the configuration. It is possible to retrieve data from other drives if any one of the drives fails. However, it is not possible to recover the data, if there is a failure in both the drives. RAID 5 offers a great performance when reading data. On the other hand, low performance while writing as the system should be done with the writing of data block and parity data, right before the completion of an operation. Due to its high performance and reliability, it is expensive than RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 10

As the name suggests, RAID 10 is a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1 offering the benefits of RAID 0 in terms of performance and RAID 1 in terms of reliability. It is to be noted that RAID 10 is expensive as it needs a maximum of 4v drives and capacity utilization is 50% of the available drives. Overall it offers great performance and data protection with zero parity calculations.

RAID 6

RAID 60 is more or less similar to RAID 50 except it offers more redundancy. It is useful for very large capacity servers, especially for those do not require backup.

If you’re still confused to choose a suitable RAID level for your business here are a few simple tips. As RAID 0 offers no data protection and RAID 1 performs slower than RAID 5, 6, 10 they do not suit business needs. RAID 5 and RAID 6 are ideal for small to medium business where you can enjoy the increased performance and storage configurations at low cost. RAID 10 is a good option for a large business with a large budget and you can enjoy maximum benefits.